


The daughters of d'Artagnan

by Aja



Category: Untamed - Anna Cowan
Genre: Canon Queer Character, Crossdressing, F/M, Family, Gen, Genderqueer Character, M/M, Regency, Yuletide, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 01:46:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1100960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And this is how we come together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The daughters of d'Artagnan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [somebraveapollo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/somebraveapollo/gifts).



You might think that for weeks afterwards, the only thing anyone could talk about behind their fans at Almacks and their hands of poker at White’s was the fact that Lady Darlington had won her husband and stolen another woman’s fortune over a game of piquet. You might think that the story of her carefully calculated triumph over Lady Marmotte’s card table was even now being turned into the stuff of _ton_ legend.

But in fact, it was the damned pig.

After the match was made official, every woman this side of the channel wanted to know where they could get their hands on a piglet and even, some of them, a pair of breeches. As if they thought that all one had to do to wield the kind of courage that Kit had shown that night at her uncle’s was to don a pair of trousers and walk around London with a fashionably exotic animal at their side.

“It’ll be tiger cubs at Vauxhall next,” muttered Lady Arrington to Countess Dalrymple. “Just you wait.”

In the middle of the hubbub over Countess BenRuin’s ignorant country sister and her sudden transformation into a sort of hedonistic Corinthian, the only thing that anyone was certain of was that the Sutherlands had always been peculiar. First the mother shut herself away in the country, barely even recognized by the Earl’s family. Then the father gambled away enough money to buy a title. The son turned out to be a devoted dandy in every sense, and now their eldest daughter was acting the man of the house over her brother and husband both. The things that money could buy in the _ton_ were limitless, but some days it seemed that not even London could afford Katherine Sutherland, now Lady Katherine, Duchess of Darlington. 

And then, god help the lot of them, her husband took his seat in Parliament and instantly started campaigning for reform.

Fortunately for the jangled nerves of the aristocracy, and friends of Lady Marmotte in particular, Scotland’s climate didn’t agree with the Countess BenRuin in all walks of the year—at least not nearly as much as the brawny tow-headed Count himself seemed to agree with her. When the Countess returned, the _ton_ let out its collective breath: here, at last, was a Sutherland they could all rest easy in, a Sutherland bred to respectability and proper ways. 

And if that Sutherland had recently lopped off all her hair with no more care than a guillotine chopping off the head of a French nobleman, it was a mild rebellion compared to the unspoken revolutions her sister could hold in her eyes.

“Tom,” Lydia inquired one afternoon over a truly appalling attempt at needlework that she had begun mostly because it made Ma smile so to see her try. “When are you going to come clean as the infamous Beaumaris?” 

The two of them had joined their mother and Crispin in Kit’s morning parlour for brunch, though Kit was off somewhere being dashing and rescuing orphans, probably. The windows were high and wide, and the pink and amber light of morning accentuated Tom’s blush when he answered that he didn’t think London could stand another Sutherland-related scandal, at least this season.

Her laugh in response—or perhaps it was the smile Crispin sent him—painted their mother’s face younger than Lydia had seen it in years. They were all still adjusting to the concept that they could be happy; and, perhaps even more astonishing to the three children, that they could be not only happy together, but _at ease_. 

“Come now, Tom,” said a long-absent but all-too-familiar voice from the doorway, “I think it’s high time we had another scandal, don’t you?”

They all looked up in shock—although, Crispin, damn him, never seemed to be fazed by anything the duke did. And Kit, right behind Lady Rose in her outdated, ostentatious finery, was grinning from ear to ear in her riding suit. 

Between them, the gentleman donning a gorgeous satin Parisian number embroidered with lace from head to toe, the lady in calf-length trousers of the finest buckskin, her Hessian boots polished to a shine, they looked like an anomaly, a perfect impossibility. Lydia did not know how they existed, let alone how they existed together. They were the answer to a question she could barely even begin to put into words, much less ask.

Thank god James stayed in town for the weekend, she thought, clutching the tablecloth and putting on her best smile. She saw Tom’s eyes cut worriedly to their mother, which was a bit unfair considering how well her mother had adjusted to Tom keeping his lover by his side right under her nose.

He needn’t have worried. Lydia had always suspected that her mother had known instinctively when her children were still in infancy that they were destined to be a family of scrapes and bruises and oddities. When she looked over at Ma, she was rising with a smile on her face. 

“My dear Lady Rose,” she said, with so much sincerity that the grin on Darlington’s face faltered for a moment before she winked back at him. “It’s so good to see you again.”

Tom’s jaw slowly slid to the floor, and Lydia dabbed her mouth with her napkin in order to stifle a laugh. Next to him, while their mother’s back was turned, Crispin laced their fingers together and squeezed.

And this is how we come together, Lydia thought, suddenly flooded with a happiness so sharp it was bitter.

Lydia could look back at the course of her marriage to James and realize how hard she’d made things, how much she’d been doing penance under the eye of what she felt sure must be her husband’s displeasure. She marvelled even now that it had taken Lady Rose, a woman who didn’t even exist, to get her family to begin unraveling its secrets and opening up to one another—and perhaps to get each of them to be honest with themselves.

But she remembered, still, the words that Kit had spoken as she struggled to explain the depth of her deception to Tom: that Lady Rose was not, perhaps, a fabrication, but rather another facet of Darlington’s personality. 

“I trust you’ve been out world-saving this morning, Kit?” she asked her sister. Kit came into the room and sat down next to her with her usual ungraceful stride. For half a second, Lydia wished she’d throw down her riding crop and toss her feet on to the table like a real man. The image—which she’d seen Kit indulge once, though never in the morning room, god forbid—made her giggle, and she suppressed it before she could seem as though her laughter was meant as a mockery. She and Kit were on far better terms than they had been in girlhood, but misunderstandings still happened.

“I was visiting with the factory overseers down from Manchester,” Kit answered. “I would have liked to have seen them on a weekday, but they wanted to get back to their trade, and I would not have had them ride all the way to London when meeting me in the country would work just as well.

“I could never do it,” Lady Rose interjected, coming to Kit’s side. “All that work and no time for the theatre? Unthinkable. I must have flowers in my boudoir and trips to the races.” 

She was fully inhabiting the role of the Duke’s cousin, so she only squeezed Kit’s shoulder; but the look she and Kit sent each other held a spark that Lydia could almost see light the air between them. It dawned on her at once that the things they did together when they were alone probably surpassed anything in her hitherto vast understanding of such matters.

It still stung, sometimes, that despite what she’d seen as an intimate relationship she’d not even tapped the surface of the truths Darlington had to reveal. She’d expected nothing from him; after all, she was a dalliance and he a weapon she’d used to make her husband angry. But it had hurt to realize that her sister, who had wanted nothing more than to protect her when she first entangled herself with Darlington, had won his given name from him so easily, as if he’d just been waiting for the right person to come along and have all of his secrets for the asking.

And to look at them now, she supposed he had. She reflected, not for the first time, that had the game Kit and Darlington played for each other’s hearts not been so successful, their family would have had more than enough indecency to spread their ruin around: Kit a gambler, Tom a macaroni merchant and a writer of _novels_ —sometimes the _ton_ didn’t seem to know which sin was worse. And Lydia, of course, whose infidelity should have marked her as worse than all of them combined, whose sin was _actual_ instead of a social judgment against which no one could argue, was somehow the one Sutherland child who seemed to be above the _ton’s_ censure.

She was still contemplating this when Lady Rose leaned over and touched her hand. “We must get this one out of her office more, mustn’t we, Lydia, darling?”

When Lydia met Lady Rose's eyes, she saw for a dazzling moment another woman who had all the same desires and impulses, frustrations and longings that she or any other highborn woman had. Why shouldn’t Lady Rose have flowers and trips to the races? Why shouldn't she have anything she wanted? she caught herself thinking. The effect startled the breath out of her.

She took a look around her, at her gentlemanly sister and her queer brother and the way their mother couldn’t stop beaming at her children, as though they’d all turned out exactly as she’d hoped they would. Where did that leave her? she wondered, and then the answer came to her, sure and sudden: it left her right where she belonged.

That strong wave of happiness broke over her again, only this time it was unfettered by regret.

“Of course, Lady Rose,” she said when she could speak again, pleased to see Lady Rose’s smile grow. “And we must get you more flowers in your boudoir. Where will we find you a dashing young man who will woo you with the roses you deserve?”

She looked over at Kit, who, lo and behold, was blushing.

“I think I have an idea,” said Kit, and she placed her arm, still clad in her men’s cropped riding jacket, on Lady Rose’s arm.

Lydia smiled.

And this is how we come together, she thought.


End file.
